I wouldn’t say my love of garlic is as passionate as Kona’s, but I do like the stuff. I use it fairly often in my recipes. I ran out about a week ago and I was missing it, so when I was at the grocery store yesterday I made sure to look for some. My only choice was purple garlic — a package of five, no less. I didn’t see any reason not to buy it, so I did.
That night I decided to make some sauteed broccoli, scarily similar to the recipe Bob posted recently. It has to be my favorite way to cook (and eat!) broccoli. Yet, the first bite I took, I realized there was something was … not quite right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I just was not enjoying my food.
At first I wanted to blame the broccoli, but I could tell it was fresh when I bought it, so that couldn’t be it. After a couple more bites, I knew the culprit was the purple garlic. It’s strange because I could swear I’ve used purple garlic plenty of times before — my neighbor grows it. Maybe I just never used it in a dish where the flavor really stood out.
I can’t quite say what was wrong with the flavor, just that it wasn’t what I wanted from my garlic. This has happened to me before, when I accidentally bought elephant garlic to make garlic bread. Although, a quick look at the Wikipedia page in the link tells me exactly why I don’t like it — it’s actually a kind of leek, which means it’s more like an onion, which means it is awful.
As for the purple variety though, I don’t really understand. I could only describe the flavor as kind of … musty. Which is just not how I want anything that I eat to taste. All signs point to it being perfectly fresh as well, though.
And if you remember from the beginning of my story, I bought five heads of the stuff. I’m sure it’s not a total loss, it’ll probably get pureed into tomato sauces and used in recipes where it will have to compete with stronger flavors. As for the broccoli though, I couldn’t finish it, which is just a shameful waste of perfectly good veggies. Lesson, consider yourself learned.
Clacked by Cate Cropp
on May 16, 2009 @ 12:00 EST5EDT
